Restaurateur Lets Off Steam in Kitchen

During the lunch shift at the Five Feet Too restaurant in Newport Beach, owner Michael Kang is at the stove, sleeves rolled up, experimenting with a dish.

At dinner time a few hours later, Kang is at his other restaurant, doing the same thing.

“I feel I need to keep my hand in the day-to-day cooking,” Kang said. “That’s really my therapy. When I’m in the kitchen, I just shut out the rest of the world.”

His therapy has paid off. Kang, 29, opened his first restaurant, Five Feet in Laguna Beach, at age 22. The second restaurant opened three years ago.

“It’s really a hands-on type of business,” Kang said. “We’re not big enough to be a chain, but we’re more than a mom-and-pop type of business.”

If he could, Kang said, he would “be in the kitchen all day long.” But there are other demands.

“During the day, I have to deal with operating the business, and there are so many details that it can be very stressful. Cooking is my relaxation. I get to use my creativity and really have fun. It’s the playing around part and creating new dishes that I really enjoy.”

Kang, who lives in Laguna Beach, said he often experiments with new dishes, mostly with success. But sometimes, he admits, “they don’t make it out of the kitchen.”

Diners can choose from Chinese dishes as varied as duck breast with Chinese sauce to goat cheese won ton.

“Chinese cooking is really the oldest cooking,” Kang said. “It’s very sophisticated, but it’s been constantly reinterpreted and molested in the United States.

“Being of Asian descent, I wanted to change how people perceive Chinese cooking, so we opted to use all fresh vegetables instead of canned. . . .

“I think we’ve educated a few people. You won’t find things like sweet and sour pork or chop suey. And when we do something like egg foo yong, we do it the right way.”

The restaurants also use “European-style service, where there are individual servings instead of Chinese, family-style service where everything is put in the middle of the table. We think the individual servings on the plate are more elegant, and you can do some nice things with garnishes.”

Kang said his lifelong vocation began early. “I started cooking in restaurants when I was 13, and I enjoyed it right away. I found that I just had a knack for it.”

The Newport Beach restaurant was designed by the owner himself, who is a trained architect.

Before going into the restaurant business, Kang attended the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1984.

“My ultimate dream was to work as an architect all day, then run a little restaurant at night,” Kang said. “But I got real burned out as an architect and realized that I didn’t like working for people. I’m really glad it worked out this way.

“I’m having a blast.”